Putin's New Vision of 'Eurasia'

Many western politicians have harbored deep suspicions of Russian Prime Minister
Vladimir Vladimorovich Putin since he first emerged on the Russian political
stage in 1999.

This is hardly surprising, given his KGB background, though those with longer
historical memories will recall that Yuri Andropov came from the same organization
and that the West grudgingly found a way to work with him.

While the worst aspects of the Cold War faded away with the peaceful collapse
of the USSR in late 1991, twenty years later, trying to figure out Kremlin
politics remains as vital an exercise as ever, and the "Putin era" has provided
Washington analysts desperately reinventing themselves to hang on to their
jobs with rich fodder.

Is Putin a democrat?

Stalinist?

Or something in between?

Place your bets.

What does seem to be apparent, with last week's announcement that current
President Dmitrii Medvedev would stand down in next year's presidential elections,
is that Putin is a shoe-in to recover the Russian Federation's Presidency,
and that, since the term has been extended to six years, Western governments
will perhaps have to learn to live with him helming the Russian state until
2026.

But one aspect of Russia that has eluded most Washington pundits since 1991
is the fact that Russia a) has developed a free press of sorts, certainly
in comparison to the Bad Old Soviet days, and b) that Putin is genuinely popular
with many Russians, an observation that many Western liberals find more than
a tad irritating.

But to return to basics - what Putin represents is an awareness that dawned
late in the USSR, only with the advent of Gorbachev - the power of the media.

In a weird reversal of perceptions, while Gorbachev essentially ignored domestic
opinion to cultivate a Western image of "a man with whom we can do business," to
quote Margaret Thatcher, Putin has turned the media equation on its head,
appealing to his constituency while essentially ignoring western attitudes.

But there is another audience for Putin's bravado that the West remains at
best dimly aware of - the post-Soviet space. And it is here that his efforts
have deeper resonance than most Western observers understand.

In May 2005 while President Putin told Russians that the collapse of the Soviet
empire "was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," leaving
the denizens of the fourteen other nations to emerge from the Soviet debris
field wondering exactly what he meant.

On 4 October Putin suggested that ex-Soviet states form a "Eurasian Union" in
an article which outlined his first foreign policy initiative as he prepares
to return to the Russian presidency, commenting that the organization would
build on an existing Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan which beginning
in 2012 will remove all barriers to trade, capital and labor movement between
the three countries.

Needless to say, Putin's suggestion has unsettled conservatives worldwide,
who believe that he is trying to reassemble the Soviet Union by stealth.

A more dispassionate view of Putin's proposal indicates that it actually contains
more than a modicum of sense.

First, except for economists of the Soviet era, few understand that the collapse
of the USSR tore apart a country where economic development was geared to
the union as a whole, rather than its constituent republics. To give but one
example - all the electric meters for buildings were produced in Lithuania,
so after 1991, a Kazakh, Azeri, Russian or Kyrgyz constructing a building
and wanting to measure its electrical usage had to deal with - Lithuania.

Given the way that resources, both natural and man-made were distributed across
the USSR, the collapse of the country produced consequences which are still
playing out.

Secondly, it is more than passing strange that Western capitalists, fierce
advocates of "free trade," should see a darker purpose in Putin's suggestion
- after all, NAFTA in the Western Hemisphere and the EU have developed similar
trading principles. In NAFTA, the U.S. is obviously the dominant power, and
Germany occupies a similar economic position in the EU, yet few argue that
either is seeking to dominate its fellow states.

Last but not least, the reality for the bulk of the post-Soviet space, and
including the USSR's former protectorate over Eastern Europe, the Russian
Federation remains Eurasia's dominant energy superpower, with the exceptions
of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and only Azerbaijan has managed
to wiggle out from under Moscow's thumb for its energy exports to the West.

And even those are subject to Russia's pressures, as the brief August 2009
Russo-Georgian war indicated.

The economic integration of the European Union has hardly led to increased
military tensions between EU members - accordingly, for Western observers,
they should at least adopt a 'wait and see" attitude towards Putin's "Eurasian" suggestions,
as closer economic integration could in fact benefit former Soviet states
who sign up.

But, at the end of the day, Western negativity towards the proposal may well
be grounded in fears that Western investors may find the dynamics of the playing
fields in the post-soviet space shifting. The litmus test in the case will
be Kazakhstan, whose booming energy sector in the last two decades has attracted
more than $120 billion in foreign investment, and whose President Nursultan
Nazarbayev had given his support to the "union."

One of the most striking developments in the post-Soviet space has been the
rise of nationalism, and there is little in Putin's remarks to indicate that
he intends to send Russian tanks rolling to reassert Kremlin control.

Sometimes, to quote Sigmund Freud, a cigar is just a cigar, and a customs
union is just a customs union - and Moscow has other interlopers to worry
about besides Western capitalism - like China, who even the Kremlin's Marlboro
Man has yet to figure out how to counter.

If the last two decades have shown anything, it is that the new nations of
the USSR would prefer to interact with the European union, or, better yet
- the United States - but the former seems solely interested in their energy
assets, while the latter is interested in buying everything that is not bolted
down while delivering hectoring human rights lectures to boot.

And Moscow, is, after all, the devil that they know - but Beijing has the
yuan, not dollars.

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